In the Pink
by Rhyolight04
Summary: "What was it like, when you met him?" John Watson's first adventure with Sherlock Holmes, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Chaos. Low-angst, though the frame is post-Reichenbach. Recovery Position universe, but stands alone. Ensemble cast.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** If I had to guess, I'd say this takes place in mid-summer of 2013. (Same universe as Recovery Position, but you don't need to have read that; the action proper takes place before that story.) John's military career is roughly the same as the one outlined in the fabulous, madly NSFW Two Two One Bravo Baker ( Archive of Our Own #180121) because I like that fic so much; but it's not that universe, obviously.

* * *

_"What was it like, when you met him?" Polly asks, when she's caught her breath.  
She has bright dark eyes and hair that is subject to change. Lately it's been blondish. She's my webmistress, and hauling me up the stairs is above her pay-grade. We're friends—not that kind of friends—and she does a decent job reading my mind. Though I have had it done better, possibly because Polly understands ordinary courtesy and Sherlock never bothered with that._

_Or it may be she knows I'm thinking of him because I often am. Thinking of Sherlock. Particularly whenever I come home. There should be a plaque in the hallway. Above the patches. We repapered, but knowing an assassin has made holes in your wall trying to pretend he was from the Gas Board…I know Mrs. H and I can still see them._

_"You're asking about him because I'm drunk."_

_"I'm asking because tomorrow we can agree you were incoherent. Here's a glass of water, by the way."_

_I drink most of it. "You are very kind."_

_"I am very curious," she says. "And if it helps you that would be nice, too."_

_"I don't need help," I tell her automatically._

_Even through the.. Ooh, what have I had? Barley wine, which accounts for a lot of this. I think. Anyway, through the very welcome an-aesthetic (does it mean I can't appreciate paintings? No, John, don't be silly. It means the pain is sitting next to me for a bit instead of inhabiting the pit of my stomach) RIGHT, I am definitely unsafe to drive, but I can still tell when she doesn't believe me. And it isn't that I don't need help, it's that the help I need is unavailable. Or that I've already had so much, and what I need these days is to manage using that, to keep on being the person I was when I was with Sherlock._

_"Everyone needs help," Polly tells me confidently. She does not, in fact, need anyone's help, and will say so on the slightest provocation. It's one of those statements that Sherlock detested. An un-truism. "But you… I know it hurts, but you also sometimes look so alive, remembering him. I like seeing you look that way. And I do want to know. So tell me what it was like, becoming friends with him."_

_Polly usually pulls me back from thinking about the loss. She's good like that. Only tonight she's asking about Sherlock, which is really a big step for her. She worries so much about being a fan, because she wants to be a friend. And I love her for both. I still don't really want to talk about him. But thinking about what I had, who, is better than thinking about the empty place he's left. Is this what they mean by it getting better, actually beginning to find his memory a good thing?_

_"So tired of crying," but that isn't where I am so much, tonight. A definite improvement. Not being maudlin even while intoxicated. Could be all right. Polly is looking at me, wants to be encouraging, sees I'm not going to the broken place. She pats me on the shoulder._

_"Then take a deep breath and use your words, John."_

_"Will you make tea? You wouldn't believe how much tea we drank."_

_"Here's me putting the kettle on, all right?"_

_What can I possibly say about what he was like? She knows what I've written about him better than I do, better than anyone; she'll quote paragraphs at me that I barely remember writing. Unnerving, not just because of her attention to me, but because I can understand how little I could have seen when I looked at Sherlock. I suppose I can't really blame myself for that; I do remember the first few times I was surprised._

_How little I knew of him? How little I observed. He was right about that._

_Anyway, when I started writing the blog, really started—by which I mean started writing about Sherlock instead of saying anything about myself—I wrote unvarnished facts, the kind of thing I thought was undebatable. Mostly, that he was amazing._

_Sherlock doubted every word, of course, because his unvarnished facts were written in stone—blood, individual hairs, traces of paint and lipstick and threads of fibre—things you wouldn't varnish with description, let alone sentimentality or unnecessary background; and he wasn't likely to admit he was amazing. People had told him too often that it was bad, to the exactly same degree that it was amazing. Working as a detective gave him one place that was relatively safe to do what he did, to be who he was, without being condemned. Relatively safe. For a time._

_Polly is looking at me with concern, because I have gone so quiet._

_"I'm just thinking," I said. " 'What it was like becoming friends with him', you said. We weren't friends, exactly, not the way you and I are. He was very tall. All sorts of tall. He stood out. People used to call him freak but he sort of was, which was why I hated that so much. Mycroft can pass but I don't think Sherlock ever could."_

_"Pass?"_

_"For normal. Like us. Ordinary."_

_"I got teased at school for being a nerd, and not running after boys the way everyone thought I ought to. I know it wasn't anything like what it must have been for Sherlock, though. Everyone says he was different."_

_"Different isn't bad. What killed me then was he thought it was. It made him horrible, nasty, suspicious, unkind, every word like that. Made him stupid about people."_

_"What do you mean? He could tell everything about everyone from looking at them, how could he be stupid about people?"_

_"He was really good at telling what had happened in a particular place at a particular time with a particular result, which was often—not always—what someone had done. Ideally, a trail of dismembered bodies. One of the things he liked about crimes was that they were usually committed for a relatively small set of reasons: money, revenge, hiding something, a very small set of motives, really, for a nicely defined set of actions. Take him out of crime scene and it was unknown territory. And people in unknown territory aren't always at their best."_

_"But you liked him anyway."_

_"Well, eventually. I suppose. Not quite the right word."_

I can't really tell you what it was like to come back to London after Afghanistan. I'd been in Somalia for a year before the tours in Afghanistan and I hadn't spent time in England in the winter in years. It was dark all the time, and it was so cold. The damp got into the shoulder and it felt like it was in the leg all the time. I couldn't get warm except in the sauna at PT. I'd spent four months in various hospitals, first with the shoulder proper, then with typhoid, for God's sake. Who gets typhoid nowadays? Someone whose vaccine was compromised? or was exposed to an interesting variant with antibiotic resistance?

Someone who was beyond tired of the army because I'd lost one or two (or forty) too many mates, who was tired of patching up people so they could go hurt more people who wanted to hurt them. Who used to believe in what I was doing, if not quite where or why I was doing it. Who had begun to be battered before becoming broken.

Well. Enough of that. The typhoid was certainly resistant. I wasn't. I wasn't in the best of shape before I got shot, and in the dark of night—one of the things I ought to have been telling the therapist—was a streak of magical thinking suggesting I'd done this to myself because I needed to get out, and resigning my commission was not an option (that would have been healthy). How I had arranged to be hit by a shooter from a quarter-mile away—not even aimed at me personally, just someone taking potshots at a bunch of invaders—not even I in my self-loathing could be sure, but I knew I had done it to myself. And some days I was angry I hadn't made a proper job of it and missed the operations and the rehab and the typhoid and the response to the antibiotics and the rehab and the therapy and the rehab… everything hurt.

And then one day—not really that it hurt less, but that it hurt less often—I was out of the fluorescent, antiseptic, echoey place that was familiar and at least orderly, and set free in London. Out of the army, not that it was a good place, not that it had been home for awhile before I got shot—well, all right, a dysfunctional home, but a familiar one with lots of siblings who weren't Harry—and in a bedsit suitable for a Tokyo airport sleeping pod. In a mindless retraining scheme dedicated to taking people used to combat medicine and deadly gushing wounds and teaching them to notice the difference between Rubella and Fifth Disease. And to care about that.

I might have been better off retraining for an A&E practice but I did tend to shake (and fall over) and they said there was a greater need for GPs. I went through the retraining with higher marks than I worked for, thanks to spending most of my leaves between tours and a good number of the quiet moments trying to keep up my qualifications so I could still be a trauma surgeon even though, really, I preferred being a commando.

Even I saw a bit of a disconnect there, but both occupations are for arrogant men (and women, if they'd let them) who make split-second, life-and-death decisions about other people's lives and deaths. I hadn't liked being a patient at all. But being, as it were, on the other side of the clipboard, in hospital, was still more familiar than being out of one, and being out of the army. And being alone.

They need half-way houses for soldiers. The suicide rate in America is famously shameful, but it's not much better here. No matter how glad anyone is to be home, with loved ones if you're lucky enough to have any, glad to be to be sound enough of mind and body not to be spending all the time in one kind of therapy or another: you miss the orderly life, the defined expectations. The catering and the laundry and the housecleaning service. You miss being with people you don't have to explain everything to, even if you like the ones you're with now, love them, care enough not to tell them to bugger off and stop staring. Even telling someone to do that is a good deal more personal, takes a great deal more energy, than I think many of us returning have to spare. I suppose being alone meant I didn't have to try to act as though I were really at home. I didn't have one.

Did I have PSTD? One of the things that did catch my interest in the how-to-be-a-tame-doctor course was a completely superficial segment about the autism spectrum. Mostly enough to let you know when someone's kid was farther off the wall than usual (Have you ever met a sane two-year-old? Or a sane teen, for that matter?) and that you might need to refer them to a different kind of specialist (rather than just give the parents anti-anxiety meds and a strong talking-to about whether they could call in the grandparents for respite care).

But the whole idea that someone in conventional medicine could recognise a spectrum of disability (difference, if you like, but I was thinking about myself) fascinated me. We so like 'on and off', 'healthy/unhealthy'. If only it were so easy as 'pregnant/not pregnant' (and God knows the abortion wars have made even that harder to define). But for all kinds of illness—diabetes, obesity, anything we class under mental health and hope like hell will just go away—a range from 'you might keep this in mind' to 'barely treatable' to 'Go directly to a doctor and GET HELP' seems like common sense, if harder to issue codes for, if less simple to deal with than yes or no.  
I regarded myself as somewhere pale-coloured on the PTSD spectrum, and that seemed right and actually comforting. It made sense. Something to keep an eye on. Oh, and depression.

I don't know whether people who aren't something to do with the profession think about diagnoses as much as I did. I get patients who have spent enough time thinking and researching to be completely misled (not all of them). Doctors make the worst patients partly because, compared to the rest of the population, we actually do know more about what's going on, and we also resent being Them, patients, instead of Us, the ones who fix things. No matter how much I knew about depression, which was quite a lot, I didn't like to think of it in myself. But it was definitely there.

So I had at least three people in my head: the doctor, who noticed John wasn't sleeping well, and that in fact John was not doing the things he ought to be doing like going out and meeting people and trying to chat up women; the sad sick person I didn't want to know about who wanted to lie under the bed, instead of on it, and not come out again, who certainly had Seasonal Affective Disorder, if you want a label, and who was afraid none of the pain—of the different kinds of pain—would get better, because why should they?; and the one I thought of as myself, good old reliable calm I-really-don't-need-to-shoot-anyone John Watson, who I was supposed to be when I wasn't holding a clipboard.

That John Watson was an awful lot of trouble to maintain.

He was losing ground.

He might not have been getting out of the way of oncoming traffic as automatically as he should have been.

He was envious of people with pneumonia sometimes.

He wasn't really looking at his illegally-owned weapon the way he should have.

In fact, what the hell was he, I, doing with a gun in the first place? Someone in the same room in the last stage of my inpatient life had managed to smuggle it out of Iraq. He had told me one night, over covert and completely counter-indicated whiskey (my alcoholic relative had never been so thoughtful as to bring me anything but a phone and a series of headaches) how he was worried about having it, would I hold onto it for him? He was sectioned a couple of days later, suggesting he'd been entirely correct. Having accepted the thing, I should have passed it along to a responsible authority, but I didn't.

Even the doctor inside me was quite pleased to have it, though I knew buying the ammunition was a sign of the kind of problem I should have passed along as well.  
I would have hotly denied I was anywhere on a 'suicidal' spectrum, and then explained that perhaps I was, a little, but nothing anyone needed to be concerned about.  
I didn't like any of the people in the retraining scheme but I missed it when it ended, and then I was officially unemployed. Trying to persuade someone to hire you when you don't think you're worth interviewing is practically impossible.

Nor are the weeks before Christmas the best times to look for work. I knew that perfectly well, just as I knew that I had to spend Christmas week with Harry, who was, at that time, two months into having formally chosen vodka over her civil partnership. She even said so. After splitting up with Clara, Harry was having her own financial troubles; their little house was full of empty places and Harry was talking about selling it in the new year. It was the first Christmas we had been alone together since our parents died, and the only thing we agreed on was now much neither of us wanted to move back to our home town. It made my empty bedsit look like Paradise.

And it was still the darkest time of year.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N Some of the events and dialogue in this story will differ from the received BBC version as transcribed, wonderfully, by Ariane DeVere (arianedevere Dot livejournal Dot com SLASH (not that kind of slash wellnotmuch) 36505 DOT html), whose transcriptions and notes are absolutely invaluable to any fic writer or rabid fan. Her fic is good, too. Any weird ideas, mistakes, and distortions are my own. **  
**And only those distortions belong to me. No offense or copyright violation is intended and no profit will be made.**

* * *

I liked Geoff, my physical therapist, far more than I liked Ella. He asked less of me. PT hurt like hell, hurt amazingly, but it made sense, and I had recovered far more strength and range of motion in my arm and shoulder than I'd feared I ever would. And he gave a massage afterward, differently painful from the therapy proper, that left me in a contented, exhausted collapse, barely able to stumble home before I slept, and slept really well. One night a week was good, anyway.

Ella's job was to stop me hiding from the pain, in fact to help me lie down in front of the pain and let it roll over me like a tank. After seeing her, my head hurt and my heart had squeezed itself into some kind of crack like a frightened amoeba. Whether she was a bad therapist or just the wrong one or it just wasn't the right time, her trying to pry things out felt like it did more harm than good. Therapy was one of the last orders I was carrying out, not something I thought—and I mean my actual medical self—I should be doing right now. I knew I was in terrible condition inside and out, but right then a chance to patch some of the holes in the roof would have helped more than tearing out all the floors as she thought we should be doing. I didn't tend to sleep well afterward, or the night after that, either.

And neither of them had any idea what to do about my leg. The limp turned up as the typhoid let go of me, well after the fever or anything they felt could have actually affected my leg or my nervous system. It was unreliable, either as an injury or as a limb. Geoff tsked over it, did (painful) things to the muscles, compared and contrasted it with my other leg. Put it through exercises, persuaded it to move weights, which it occasionally did, but not my weight. Except sometimes.

One day Geoff explained to it with breathless obscenity that it was making my life harder and not saving me from a damn thing so would it please quit fucking about and act responsible? That made me laugh, but I still couldn't put any weight on it except when I wasn't thinking about it. Try not thinking about your leg.

"Professional question," Geoff said one day, while we were both thinking about my leg.

"Go."

"Sex."

"Something other people have, right?"

"That's not promising. How long have you been out of hospital?"

"About six weeks now."

"I think it would help your leg."

"Getting it over someone?"

"Very funny."

"I haven't even thought about sex," I said, which was not true. "I get enough polite refusals applying for jobs."

"So you aren't even trying."

"Nope." That was true.

"You should just practise, you know? Ask people you know aren't interested, get relaxed about asking and getting turned down, I think you'll do well."

It had a certain mad cleverness to it, since I couldn't see anyone being interested in me that way at all. I could succeed at failing. "I'll keep it in mind."

"You come back next week, I want to hear you've been shot down by at least three birds. Blokes. Anyone. All right?"

"It shouldn't be that hard to arrange," I said. "Better than the homework my psychotherapist gives me."

"Five things you want to forget so he can go into them in excruciating detail?"

"She. Ella Thompson." It was the same building, but he didn't know her. "She wants me to blog."

"That's so much worse than just keeping a journal, she must have it in for you."

"No, I think it's a plot to get British veterans computer-literate by every possible means."

At least with seeing Geoff I knew why I hurt afterward. The kind of questions Ella would ask, when she wasn't trying the silent treatment out (in return) on me, were the kind that got under my skin and made the hours while I wasn't sleeping worse. And the blog she hoped would bring me out of myself just looked back at me and emphasised how much worse my life was since being forced to leave my nice war zone.

And then I would remember that the army wasn't the home it had once been and the hundred reasons why, not one of which I felt like displaying to the world any more than I wanted to show off the scars on my shoulder and chest. It felt as though my leg was determined to tell everyone how utterly fucked I was, and I agreed with it. I was.

It was less than a week after the conversation with Geoff, an hour after a session with Ella, that I found myself near St. Bart's. I had some idea of dropping by their HR department; I loved the place when I was a student there, and it held nothing but good memories. I hadn't known Mike Stamford very well, but I was thinking of those days when he called out to me.

It was my first conversation in years with anyone from that time in my life. It had taken several years for me to realise that much as I loved medicine, a sensible career plan was not enough, but, in those years before Facebook, graduates fell out of touch more easily than they do now. I had left my civilian friends behind, along with the sensible career plans. Seeing Mike now all huge, but happily settled down, made my heart sink. He was a lovely guy and almost exactly whom I hadn't wanted to be when I grew up, which went to show what an idiot I was.

The coffee was delicious, though, and I tried not to be as ungracious as I felt. At least he hadn't asked how many people I'd killed. "So you're settling in London, or waiting till you find a position or—?" he asked.

"Right now it's very handy for the PT and so forth," I said. "But it's expensive. I went back to look at my home town and I'm afraid there's no going back there."

"Well, I remember you felt that way when you were here—"

That wasn't it. Then, like any young person, I wanted brighter lights and just generally MORE than what I was used to. Now I wasn't sure at all that I wanted London's vastness and energy; but Aldershot is an army town. Between the fit young warriors and the number of wounded ghosts like me (and worse…remember, I was lucky) that I'd seen in one afternoon on the high street it was too much. And I'd left the people I knew there even farther behind than the ones in medical school.

"I can't afford London on a military pension and I've no idea when — I need a flat share or something." I'd thought of it before, with loathing. "I suppose I could find a room in a house full of medical students. Be the ghost in the attic." Skeleton at the feast.

"You're over thirty. If trying to keep up with the drinking didn't kill you you'd end up murdering them; bad idea, John. You need an another adult." He looked thoughtful. "At least another man over thirty."

"I could be quite happy living with a woman, possibly several—"

"Identical twins or a blonde, a brunette and a redhead? Do they have to be air hostesses?"

"Actually, strike that. I just want a quiet life." (I really thought I did. People ought to, it's the English ideal. Look at Neville Chamberlain.) "You're looking troubled."  
"Well, I had a thought. But now I'm not sure."

"Oh, come on. I scream in my sleep, when I sleep; I have intermittent outbursts of rage with machines of all kinds; no job; and almost nothing to my name but an electric kettle and my grandmother's teapot. Who'd want me for a flatmate?"

"That's the thing. You're the second person today who's said that."

"What's the matter with him, then?"

"Nothing, really."

"Axe murderer, then?"

"Funny you should say that. No, have you ever run into any really bright, oh, twelve year-olds who are going mad trying to get off the parental leads?"

"I've been one—"

But Mike was shaking his head. "Not like this. Much worse, I was going to say. Brighter than anyone I've ever met about some things, and stupider about others. I'd call him socially inept if I hadn't seen him playing poor Molly like an accordion. She's the woman in charge of the lab: good pathologist, bad taste in men." Someone I should ask out, I thought, mindful of Geoff's assignment.

"Is he a teacher, like you?"

Mike giggled. Then guffawed. "I would truly love to see him actually try to teach. Don't know whether that would be worse for him or for the students. The survivors might do very well. He can be patient, I've seen it; he's always patient with his chemistry projects, but not usually with people."

"What kind of chemist is he?"

"He's not a chemist, he just likes doing research. Often on corpses. Knows more about decay than anyone in London, I shouldn't wonder."

"What does he do for a living?"

"God knows. He's at the lab for days on end, frightening the students and ruining the supervisor's morale; then I won't see him for months. But he's well-enough turned out, I don't think he'd stiff you on his half of the rent."

I could meet this friend of his before stopping into see if Bart's had any jobs.

"Or," Mike pointed out, "you could go talk to the secretary of the Bart's and London Alumni Association, which might be able to help. Get your name out again to people who know you."

"I forget that there are any," I said. "I really don't feel like the same man I was when I finished up here."

"The question that matters," Mike said, "is whether you're a better doctor now. I know what you were doing wasn't strictly medicine, they don't hand out Military Crosses for that—"

"The MC actually did involve medicine—" Field surgery of the least delicate kind, but it had kept three of my team alive for a while, and two of them could walk again.

"You make us proud. You need to come to dinner and tell Katie and me about that."

"Can I not tell you, and come to dinner anyway?" So I was feeling less like roadkill than usual when we walked into the lab and I laid eyes on Sherlock Holmes.

No one is immune to beauty. I'm sure that shaped his life as much anything else. To look equal parts pretty and alien, with that accent, meant he had spent most of his life being observed. The beauty and the accent were in anyone's face as much as my limp, and strangely, the first thing I felt for him was a kind of pity. He was born to be a lighting rod. Everything about him said he knew, and he hated it. That was before I knew what he used the voice for, which was taking things, people, situations apart, without too much care where the pieces went (part of his character you can still see in this flat, I'm afraid. Much worse when he was here). And whether or not he could have blended in to the background with any great success, he wasn't trying.

"Mike, can I borrow your phone?" he asked. "Mine's dead."

"What's wrong with a landline?" Mike asked in return.

"I prefer to text." The whole 'texting' thing had passed me by in Afghanistan and I was still doubtful of the phone Harry had given me, but I offered it to him. That earned me a second glance. "Afghanistan or Iraq?"

"Sorry?" I asked.

"Which was it – Afghanistan or Iraq?"

"Afghanistan. Sorry, how did you know …?" I was more than surprised. Mike looked smug, as though he kept Sherlock as a treat for visitors. I wasn't sure I liked it. He gave me back my phone.

A pretty woman in a lab coat came in and handed him a mug. One look and I knew she was Molly the lab supervisor with the ruined morale; it was written in her shoulders as she avoided Sherlock's eyes. I watched him be casually unkind to her; for God's sake, no one talks to a woman about her makeup, do they? But it wasn't anything important to him, which was a point in his favour. I don't like people who gloat. For him, this was just another skirmish; and she scurried away wondering why she bothered. He had that effect on a lot of people. Unlike Molly, most of them stopped bothering and began full-scale self-defence. Of course, you had to wonder why he saw interacting with her as a clash of wills. He was fascinating, and attractive, and not very nice.

"How do you feel about the violin?" he asked before she had even cleared the room.

"I'm sorry, what?" I asked, once I was sure he was speaking to me.

"I play the violin when I'm thinking. Sometimes I don't talk for days on end. Would that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other."  
I was flummoxed. Mike hadn't said a word about flatmates, but his friend seemed to know why I was there. "Oh, you ... you told him about me?"

Mike kindly ignored my babbling. "Not a word," he said. "Didn't know you were even in town."

"Then who said anything about flatmates?" I asked.

" I did," said Sherlock. "Told Mike this morning that I must be a difficult man to find a flatmate for. Now here he is, just after lunch with an old friend, clearly just home from military service in Afghanistan. Wasn't that difficult a leap."

"How did you know about Afghanistan?"

"Got my eye on a nice little place in central London. Together we ought to be able to afford it. We'll meet there tomorrow evening; seven o'clock. Sorry—must dash. I think I left my riding crop in the mortuary." One of the great exit lines of history, surely.

" Is that it?" I asked, scrambling for a foothold in this mad conversation.

"Is that what?"

"We've only just met and we're going to go and look at a flat?"

"Problem?"

"We don't know a thing about each other; I don't know where we're meeting; I don't even know your name." And I have always thought that was a test; if I hadn't asked, he wouldn't have told me, and I would never have known where to meet him. It let him know that I wouldn't be overwhelmed by him, wouldn't let him flatten me like grass in his tyre-tracks. Not all the time, at least.

He stopped and looked at me; not, really, that I think he needed to; he already had most of what he needed.  
"I know you're an Army doctor and you've been invalided home from Afghanistan. I know you've got a brother who's worried about you but you won't go to him for help because you don't approve of him – possibly because he's an alcoholic; more likely because he recently walked out on his wife. And I know that your therapist thinks your limp's psychosomatic – quite correctly, I'm afraid. That's enough to be going on with, don't you think? The name's Sherlock Holmes and the address is Two Two One B Baker Street. Afternoon." And he was gone.

Mike and I were left in a little pool of his absence. I looked at him.

"Yeah," said Mike. "He's always like that."

"Prima donna, much?"

Mike snorted. "Very much, but I think he's real. I've never caught him out on a fact. He seems like he's asserting all this rubbish—you heard him talking about yourself—but it's not rubbish."

"How does he have any idea what I can afford?"

"He can probably tell by your shoes. I don't know, he does that sort of thing a lot. Sits in on lectures sometimes, storms out halfway through more often than not; asks very strange hard questions if he doesn't. I've seen him here with cops quite a lot, too; NSY keeps most of its corpses here and he consults for them. Not the corpses, the police. So far as I know."

Of course he did consult for the corpses, if you believe the dead want justice; he mostly did to them what he'd just done to me, without the need to listen to the evasion, outright lies, and misapprehensions he would complain about from the living (though without the regional accents or idle remarks or unintended observations that might turn out to be pivotal evidence). It was why he liked serial killers so much; they left a trail of silent information.

Did I knew my life had taken a turn? Yes, I think I did. I hoped it had. 'Love at first sight' is completely wrong, but it was a bit like that. Something at first sight. Colour in a monochrome world. It gave me something to think about besides myself, particularly after I Googled him and found his website. It didn't give much away, but it was more interesting than mine. Living with someone who thought about crime and corpses and chemistry sounded better than a houseful of medical students.

I could not for the life of me see why he'd want to live with me, except that unlike Molly, I wouldn't be looking at him with big sheep's eyes wanting something. You deal with bright, wilful kids by being kind and firm and not getting drawn in, which my time in the army had made me very good at. Besides, he wasn't likely to want anything I had enough to need to manipulate me. (This was untrue, but at the time I had no idea how lazy he was. Or how much he enjoyed manipulating people.)

I texted him once, to ask how much the rent would be; he answered with a number, low enough I could afford it, and his initials. I suppose if you borrow other people's mobiles often you are in the habit of leaving a distinguishing mark.

London at seven on a winter evening is pitch black. I'd taken the wrong direction from the Tube station and had to sort myself out; it had seemed, for a moment, as though there was no 221 Baker Street at all, but I found it just as a cab was drawing up and Sherlock Holmes stepped out of it. We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries and he told me he'd done a favour to the landlady by getting her husband executed, which would have been socially awkward had the landlady not opened the door and given him a warm hug. No hard feelings, evidently. And Sherlock was friendly to her, no edges. She gave him a set of keys ("I should have had them made up for you sooner, dear") and took us up the stairs to 221B.

It was about as different from my bedsit as anywhere had ever been, stuffed like a half-unpacked Victorian museum and warm in a way I hadn't been since…well. Possibly ever. I wondered who on earth Mrs. Hudson had let to before, with all this…a stuffed bat? A really-strange-looking goth cow skull on the wall in earphones? And books everywhere, all kinds of books. No fiction since about 1960, but the non-fiction ranged from an eighteenth-century Principia Mathematica to scientific papers that hadn't passed peer review yet.

It turned out all this was his, Sherlock's: some of the furniture, all of the stuff. He was all clean lines, himself; I'd have taken him for a high-tech, Scandinavian-design Bond-villain-lair sort of man, but apparently his heart was in 1895 somewhere. It took me a week to find the telly.

"There's another bedroom upstairs if you'll be needing it," Mrs. Hudson was saying as Sherlock attempted to prove he was really a very tidy person who had just fallen behind a bit while unpacking.

I glanced to him for help but he was looking smug. Oookay, now I knew what kind of early-morning guests we'd be having, fine. Hardly a surprise. I hoped they were quiet. No sane person would willingly share a bedroom with him, surely, if this was what the sitting room was like?

And no one, really, with me, either. My messiness was internal. "Of course we'll be needing two. Umm, is it furnished? I haven't—I just got out of the army—"

"Oh, yes, a bed and a wardrobe, not the newest furniture— you'll probably want a different mattress, I think my mother bought the one up there now in 1954—"

The upstairs bedroom was small, probably never intended to house a double bed, but it managed to contain one as well a small desk and chair and a decent armoire, certainly big enough for the amount of clothing I owned. The window faced east, into the alley, as quiet as could be in the city; it was warm but not stuffy. There was a ridiculously small loo made out of a servant's airing cupboard or something. Sherlock had not managed to deposit any of his possessions here yet. Although the wallpaper fetishist from downstairs had reached the the upper hallway, the bedroom was unremarkable. But even without a tenant, it had more character than my bedsit. I warmed to it instantly.

"This will be wonderful, Mrs. Hudson," I said.

"Two sets of stairs with your stick, I know it's not ideal—"

"Hardly anything is, but no, it's fine. Really, thank you for having me—will you want references or anything? I can only give you—"

"No, if you're a friend of Sherlock's it will be fine, dear, he's almost never wrong."

"I only just met him," I said, not wanting to be there under false colours.

"Perhaps I should wait on getting the mattress, then."

"What!? We're not—"

"Some people find him a bit overwhelming," Mrs. Hudson said. "My poor sitting room, for instance." Her eyes glinted. I had the oddest feeling I was getting the 'Break his heart and I'll break your legs' talk from someone's granny.

"That actually looks fine, really. Inviting-"

"Sherlock needs someone to keep him on the rails. I don't know that anyone can do that, but I can tell you I had high hopes when he told me you were a war hero and a doctor—"

"I'm an invalided-out mess—"

"He doesn't think that and neither do I."

"I didn't mean I didn't want to be his flatmate, I just didn't want to claim I was his friend yet."

Her expression cleared. "You have lovely manners, dear. And about being his friend, you'll know soon enough."


	3. Chapter 3

The stairs were not too tricky. Geoff was concerned about the effect using a cane was having on my uninjured shoulder, and I was concerned about breaking my neck (although that hadn't been a concern so much as the one that it wouldn't be a clean enough break, and I was really fine, thanks, no one wants to be paralysed, do they?), but I'd learned to lean carefully so it was really more likely my coccyx at risk. I was damned if I was going to find myself a nice handicapped-accessible flat now that this one had come to my notice.

I sank down in the less-frightening chair in the sitting room and watched Sherlock tidy ineffectually. It was the last time I think I ever saw him trying to impress anyone other than using his brain, and even without knowing how rare an occasion it was, I knew he was rubbish at it. But it was nice; for whatever reason, he did want me as a flatmate and for a woman who had been married to someone executed in the States (although that didn't mean much on a scale of weirdness, did it?), Mrs. Hudson was refreshingly normal and seemed to approve of me as well. It was good to feel I still cleaned up well enough.

"I looked you up on the internet last night," I said.

"Anything interesting?"

"Found your website, The Science of Deduction." And a handful of anecdotes in people's blogs (and something called RPF I really did not want to know any more about. Ever).

He preened. "What did you think?"

I tried not very hard not to squash him, but the claims he'd made were ridiculous. "You said you could identify a software designer by his tie and an airline pilot by his left thumb."

"Yes; and I can read your military career in your face and your leg, and your brother's drinking habits in your mobile phone."

"How?" which was the question I really wanted him to answer, but Mrs. Hudson interrupted us, having given up on making sense of the lab's worth of glassware set up in the kitchen.

"What about these suicides then, Sherlock? I thought that'd be right up your street. Three exactly the same."

As she spoke, Sherlock looked out the window onto Baker Street. "Four. There's been a fourth. And there's something different this time."

"A fourth?" Mrs. Hudson asked. Then we heard the knocker on the door; as Mrs. Hudson started to go answer it, the door opened and someone rushed up the stairs. He was a bit older than I was, but gone completely grey.

Sherlock spoke to him before the man had caught his breath from the stairs. "Where?"

"Brixton, Lauriston Gardens."

"What's new about this one? You wouldn't have come to get me if there wasn't something different."

"You know how they never leave notes?"

"Yeah."

"This one did. Will you come?"

"Who's on forensics?"

"It's Anderson."

"Anderson won't work with me."

"Well, he won't be your assistant."

"I need an assistant."

"Will you come?"

"Not in a police car. I'll be right behind."

"Thank you," said the grey-haired man. He nodded at Mrs. Hudson and rushed back down the stairs, more or less exactly the way I no longer could; but I was distracted from my self-pity as Sherlock morphed into an animated version of himself.

"Brilliant! Yes! Ah, four serial suicides, and now a note! Oh, it's Christmas!" he chortled in his joy, literally leaping up and down. "Mrs Hudson, I'll be late. Might need some food—" he put his coat and scarf back on and headed for the door.

"I'm your landlady, dear, not your housekeeper—"

"Something cold will do. John, have a cup of tea, make yourself at home. Don't wait up!" and he rushed off toward the stairs, leaving me charmed, horrified, miserable.

"Look at him, dashing about! My husband was just the same." Mrs. Hudson seemed to find Sherlock's response completely in character. I wondered what exactly her husband had done. He seemed to have left at least some fond memories behind.

"But you're more the sitting-down type, I can tell," she went on. "I'll make you that cuppa. You rest your leg."

"Damn my leg!" I shouted, before I knew what I was saying. Probably because of the extroversion I'd just seen. Probably the people rushing about. Certainly not what Ella kept digging for.

"Sorry, I'm so sorry. It's just sometimes this bloody thing—" I broke off before I could start to hear the tears coming to my eyes. Bad enough to lose—everything about the army that I'd once had. Once loved. Bad enough to lose my surety of touch and my chances to simply, physically mend broken people—internal medicine was nothing like surgery and nothing was like combat. Bad enough to be unemployed and stuck in a cold country with no chances, but add to all that an injury no one could see with effects no one could overlook-

"I understand, dear; I've got a hip." Mrs. Hudson accepted my apology without more grace than it deserved and I picked up the paper to escape my feelings.

"Cup of tea'd be lovely, thank you," I said belatedly. I supposed I needed to give my notice to the bedsit and pack my teapot. And my clothes. All of which I could carry on the Tube without any problem, leg or no leg. There were a few boxes at Harry's house that I'd bring eventually.

"Just this once, dear. I'm not your housekeeper." Something about her tone suggested that whether she felt like playing the role would depend entirely on her mood.

"Couple of biscuits too, if you've got 'em?"

"Not your housekeeper!"

A cup of tea, and perhaps a look at the detritus in the sitting room before I left…The paper was open to the article about the series of suicides; and a picture of the man who had just summoned…pleaded with, Sherlock to come to the crime scene. Detective Inspector Gregory Lestrade. Whatever my flatmate-presumptive was or wasn't, Lestrade seemed to be the real deal. And he thought highly enough of Sherlock to call him in.

Sherlock himself ghosted back into the room. "You're a doctor. In fact, you're an Army doctor." Something put my guard up; or not my guard, not my back—I came ungracefully to my feet as we spoke.

"Yes," I said, fighting back the past tense.

"Any good?"

"Very good."

"Seen a lot of injuries, then; violent deaths." But it wasn't the usual 'civilian making conversation' question in his voice. More of a question about what had been on the menu of a restaurant he'd heard about.

"Mmm, yes," I said cautiously.

"Bit of trouble too, I bet." _And it was delicious, wasn't it?_

"Of course, yes. Enough for a lifetime. Far too much."_ It was the best thing I'd ever eaten. Digesting it was going to be the work of years, but oh, at the time…_

"Want to see some more?" _Wafer-thin mint?_

"Oh God, yes." _It might help it all settle_ but really, I didn't care. Something, something real. Something that made this man whose body vibrated at a rate the set the room alight leap into the air. Not healthy for me, not for anyone of course not, but it was a crime scene, not anything actually blowing up… "Sorry, Mrs Hudson, I'll skip the tea. Off out." I followed Sherlock down the stairs, caught up in his excitement.

"Both of you? Look at you, all happy. It's not decent." Mrs. Hudson smiled at Sherlock's good cheer despite the nod to propriety in her words. He was emitting quanta of joy as he danced back in the hallway and kissed her on the cheek.

"Who cares about decent? The game, Mrs Hudson, is on!"

I'd known people whose emotions filled a room, even dated a woman who made people happy just by being in the room and talking to them (it had ended well; we weren't going the same places). There were leaders in the army whom we would have followed anywhere, and did; I'd put more than one of them back together and closed the eyes on another. I had not met someone who turned on a magnetic field for crime scenes before. It was the opposite of depression, it was vitality, it was infectious, it was a good thing he seemed to be on the side of the angels. It was going to be really interesting to live with.

So he flagged a taxi, or conjured one up—all the time I knew him, he had a gift for taxis—I think it was part of the agreement he had with London; he loved the city and she loved him and that was more true than any other thing I can tell you about him.

And then he told me how he had known where I came from and something of who I was, and I realised that the outrageous claims he'd made in his website were probably nothing more than the facts. He didn't tell lies that didn't matter, and he didn't need to tell any on his website or in the process of explaining crimes. He had, of course, no morals at all about lying to get the material he needed for his deductions, which included Lestrade's warrant cards and other small items of property people were incautious enough to leave around. (Like my laptop.)

What was surprising was that he answered all my questions about how he'd figured out my circumstances and yet he still expected me to be cross about it. I thought he was amazing, and I said so, and that seemed to surprise him more than anything else about me. Surely, if people were usually unpleasant about having their lives spelled out, he would have learned not to do that?

This was so very definitely not the case.

I could see why people would tell him to piss off much more clearly after we'd met up with the police at Lauriston Gardens. Even if he was on terms of familiar hostility with Donovan and Anderson, his nastiness was overkill; it made the remarks to Molly at St. Bart's look like love tokens (and possibly Molly knew that?). On the other hand, I didn't think much of their professionalism either; if their superior officer wanted Sherlock at the scene, their opinions on the matter were not relevant. (Oh, right, not the army. Still.) 'Freak' is a fighting word, but then so is 'scrubber,' and accusing people of adultery is not conducive to a good working relationship.

'I would have thought': almost everything I _did_ think about Sherlock that first case began with that, what I would have thought, what I would have done if I'd been him, but what I learned over and over the whole time I knew him was that we weren't the same. Small compromises I made as a matter of course to smooth the friction of daily life; large and small discretions, tact, common sense: all of them, out the window. For someone like me, valuing other people's opinion if only because they could make my life easier, and actually caring—ah well, that was the word. But that first night after meeting Sherlock at Baker Street with Mrs. Hudson, and then the exchange with Donovan and Anderson, I had difficulty believing how infuriating he could be.

"Put one of these on," he said, thrusting a coverall at me.

"Why aren't you?" I asked.

"Because Anderson has already been over the scene, of course, and he would have found anything to be found, wouldn't he, Lestrade?" Sherlock plainly did not believe a word he was saying.

"The rest of us follow protocol, Sherlock, it wouldn't do you any harm—"

"He has a complete set of my fingerprints and hair samples, I've seen him following me with tweezers—"

"You're just lucky he doesn't believe in witchcraft—Detective Inspector Greg Lestrade, and you are?"

"John Watson—"

"_Doctor John Watson_, late of Her Majesty's armed forces, how long do we have to stand here, Lestrade, mouthing courtesies? Where's the body?"

"Upstairs—" Lestrade told us her name had been Jennifer Wilson. They'd been lucky to be called to the body so soon after death; someone had seen a light in the room of the abandoned house and thought it worth a look.

Somehow I hadn't expected the new murder/suicide victim to be a woman, which was foolish, of course; but the pink was probably as close as you could get to the opposite of the camouflage uniform on most of the recently-dead in my life. And the only blood was traces in the scratched word on the floor. No smell of explosives, no signs of violence. But just as dead as my friends and enemies had been.

Sherlock didn't pause. He knelt next to the body and began his examination, as quick and ruthless as his inventory of me or Sergeant Donovan. He seemed to have finished in well under the couple of minutes Lestrade was telling him he could have, though in that time he managed to reprove the policeman for thinking too loudly and both of us for not thinking enough. He called me over; I looked to Lestrade for permission, not really wanting to be part of whatever power play was going on, but Lestrade just shook his head. "Help yourself," he said, ducking outside the doorway. His plausible deniability wasn't going to be very successful.

"What am I doing here?" I asked. "I'm not a forensics expert."

"Just tell me what you see. You're helping me prove a point."

"I thought I was helping you pay the rent."

"This is more fun."

"It's not fun, there's a woman lying here dead!"

"Perfectly sound analysis, but I was hoping you'd go deeper."

I'd certainly been around people who used silly remarks to deal with death before, I had been one; but it seemed, as Mrs. Hudson had said, 'indecent' in a civilian context. I looked at her face, felt her head for bruises. "She's been dead less than six hours, no sign of violence, but her face is contorted. Whatever she took, it acted fast and hard enough she never threw up; cyanide? Could have been injected, but I'd need decent lights and a full examination to be sure."

"You've read the papers," Sherlock said. "You know about this string of suicides."

"Both of you said it was another suicide, but it could be a copycat; it could be something else entirely unconnected. I've seen heart attacks that looked like this, though not in a woman her age. Autopsy and tox screen. I don't like making up stories before I know what's actually happened," I said.

There was a moment's silence, broken by a giggle from Lestrade. "He just said that, Sherlock. Just suggested you might have made a capital error."

"Proving he's more intelligent than half of you. Anything else for now, Dr. Watson?"

"No." I stood my ground. It wasn't much, but it was mine.

"So, your two minutes are up, what have you got?" Lestrade asked.

"I am inclined, despite the doctor's perfectly reasonable caution, to agree this fits in with the other three. The deserted location, the person out of place, the lack of any evidence outside of the body to hint at the cause of death. This was fast-acting, but there's no pill bottle, no poisoned apple. Regardless, this woman—" and he went on to discuss the woman's probable profession, marital circumstances, and the earlier part of her day.

Exactly the same way he had done to me. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to live in such a state of awareness; and apparently, he couldn't imagine what it was like not to, because he said so. Anderson bristled, Lestrade barely winced; he was used to the unkind remarks. It was like seeing one of many chapters in a family quarrel, at the same time as the police and the detective threw contentions and rebuttals back and forth until Sherlock danced down the stairs shouting 'PINK!'

Manic? Just a bit? And from Lestrade's sigh to Anderson's disgusted snort, I was sure, like Stamford, that they would both have told me Sherlock was always like that.

And that was in fact what Sergeant Donovan did say, when I made my way down the stairs and found no sign of Sherlock. I returned my coverall. I asked which way to look for a cab and she gestured toward a main street. "But you're not his friend, he doesn't have friends, so who are you?"

I wasn't sure myself. I wanted the flat; I still tended to like the flatmate, even though my common sense suggested a bipolar savant would not be anything Ella would recommend. "I'm nobody," I said, not liking her, not blaming her for not liking him. "I just met him."

"Okay, bit of advice then: stay away from that guy."

"Why?"

"You know why he's here? He's not paid or anything. He likes it. He gets off on it. The weirder the crime, the more he gets off. And you know what? One day just showing up won't be enough. One day we'll be standing round a body and Sherlock Holmes'll be the one that put it there."

"Why would he do that?"

"Because he's a psychopath. And psychopaths get bored. Stay away from Sherlock Holmes." I heard Lestrade calling from inside the house and Donovan went. I picked my way toward the main street, bothered. Patronised. By someone without so much as a certificate in psychology damning someone to a life of increasing confusion and eventual destruction. By someone without Lestrade's experience dismissing her boss's evaluation. Probably with self-doubt of her own, if she was having it off with a married colleague (also an opinionated boor, apparently). Her knees had told me nothing, but I knew who I'd bet on.

It was nearly half-nine, and the evening was in full swing; all the cabs I saw were busy. Miles from the Tube and the busses weren't much good. I walked north, my mind distracted by the uglinesses of death and serial killers and superiority until my feet were falling in an almost healthy rhythm. It stuttered as soon as I noticed, and then a telephone box next to me rang. Not for the first time that evening, either; odd. Someone else reached for it and it stopped. I walked on, and now another telephone was ringing. And then fifty metres later, again. None of the scenes from my usual nightmares was like this; if I was having a psychotic break, it was better than any of the things I'd been afraid would happen. No one else seemed interested. I picked up the receiver.


End file.
